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This is a review of Miranda July's Me, You, and Everyone We Know
WARNING: Spoilers follow.

There should be something very unsettling about a six-year initiating in scatological chat with an unidentified IMer with “nice bosoms.” There should be something disturbing, but really it’s just hilarious.

I saw Todd Solondz's Happiness when it came out. I saw it at the Foundry in Georgetown, this now nonexistent cheap theatre near the water and under an office building. The place is pretty gross and we all felt dirty when we left half due to the condition of the seats, half the content of the film. Happiness stripped all innocence away from its characters and unabashedly threw it in our faces, shaking its head and saying “this is the shit you live in.” I think Me, You, and Everyone We Know gives us some of that incorruptibility back.

I didn’t let Matt read the Netflix’s synopsis of the movie because it made it sound like You’ve Got Mail, or something, that searching for love in the digital age kind of crap. Briefly, it’s the story of a bunch of people with varying degrees of connection to a family that family of four – the parents of which have recently separated, all of whom are looking for happiness, for lack of a better word.

The father is searching for feeling and authenticity in his life, and wants desperately to connect to his two boys who refuse to speak to him – not in hostility, more in disinterest and negligence. The boys, the real nucleolus of the film and the characters for whom innocence is most prominently threatened, manage to bump up against the stuff of adult films and seem to maintain their softness and their purity.

After 14-year old Petercomplies with two classmates' demands that he act as an impartial judge of their fellatio skills, he seeks out the friendship of a younger girl who is quaintly single-handedly amassing her own hope chest. And when six-year old Robbie meets the recipient of his coprolagnia-themed online chats, he silently sits next to her, sweetly brushes the hair away from her forehead, she kisses him faintly and they part.

There is lightness and fragility to the whole film – and it is that tone, that theme, that makes a cohesive whole out of all the absurd and divergent pieces. The more I think about it, the more I like it – and I feel just the tiniest bit closer to my own innocence.

p.s. back and forth forever.